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Ride the Rails: Still skeptical?

Ok, so we had been shouting ourselves hoarse, claiming that Rails is all about developer productivity and joy. So is that all about it?, huh!, was the normal reaction. But isn’t that a big enough reason. Not for many people though.

Yes, we accept that there are some pain points, like hosting Rails applications at shared hosts. No we don’t need those in production, but don’t you wish it was easier to deploy a rails app for a quick review with a client (a client who can’t run it on his own machine). Yes php scores there, just throw the code on the server and you are done. Why do I still run this blog on wordpress and not typo or mephisto? The big reason is that it’s easy to let just apache handle everything.

And the other classic allegation against Rails has been performance. Remember the discussion between JDD and DHH about CPU cycles vs. developer cycles. We are definitely headed in the direction of lesser CPU cycles for our Rails app. Rails2 made some advances towards that and with Ruby1.9 and YARV and Rubinium, we have high expectations. Also you have heard about Ruby Enterprise Edition , haven’t you?

I and those around me here, are generally biased towards rails. Ruby makes us happy. For us the pleasure points in Rails were always far more than the pain points. The basic Rails principles of DRY and Convention Over Configuration clicked with us. Ruby’s and Rail’s simplicity and beauty clicked with us. We did not need hosting on shared hosts. We could work with Rails caching to improve performance. No wonder we were one of the early adopters of Rails in India. But today, I would like to thank the critics whose untiring rants have moved Rails in the direction of being much more than what is was a couple of years ago.

Some of those changes have been in rails, but more have been around it. If you would have noticed, most of these development are not in rails as such, but in the ruby ecosystem.

Rails provides developer productivity and joy; ease of deployment; and ever-improving performance. And no, now you don’t need to go back to Java. We knew it, I am just repeating it for you.